Grove Gets 'Baghdad Blogger'
by John F. Baker -- Publishers Weekly, 7/14/2003
A young man in Baghdad who kept a daily diary on the Internet about life under Saddam Hussein during the build-up to the war in Iraq, the war itself and its aftermath has collected his writings in a book, bought by Toby Mundy of Atlantic Books in the U.K. and to be published here by Grove Atlantic's Morgan Entrekin in October. He writes under the pen name Salam Pax (his work appears as a regular column in Britain's Guardian) and Entrekin describes the book as "astonishing—it's the ultimate embedded book, the clandestine diary of an ordinary Iraqi." Mundy bought world rights, and they are now controlled by Valerie Duff at the publisher's U.K. office. "Pax," who attracted an extensive readership for his writings and was approached by a number of publishers for a book, describes himself as a 28-year-old architectural engineer, educated in Austria.
